There is a particular hero to this strand of American nerd-ocity, one whose story begins to elucidate the political ideology behind the personal computer, and he is the computer scientist Douglas Engelbart.
“The Mother of All Demos”
A product of the greatest generation that fought World War II, Engelbart had a sense of the United States’ grandeur and majesty when dedicated to a great challenge, and during the 1950s and 60s he was looking for the next great challenge. Inspired by Vannevar Bush’s article “As We May Think,” which championed the wider dissemination of knowledge as a national peacetime challenge, Engelbart imagined people sitting at “working stations”9 and coming together in powerful ways thanks to modern computing. Using computers to connect people to build a more powerful computer, to “harness collective intellect”,10 became his life’s mission. By early 1968, he showed off several of his inventions at a demonstration subsequently known as “The Mother of All Demos.” Many facets of the modern personal computer were present at this demonstration in nascent form: the mouse, the keyboard, the monitor, hyperlinks, videoconferencing.

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Many facets of the modern personal computer were present at this demonstration in nascent form: the mouse, the keyboard, the monitor, hyperlinks, videoconferencing. Unfortunately, “The Mother of All Demos” did not turn Engelbart into an instant celebrity outside nerd circles. Even inside nerd circles, most of his colleagues regarded Engelbart as something of a crank. The idea that you could sit in front of a computer and actually work at it seemed lunatic in this age of massive institutional computers that worked for days to solve your complex problem while you did something else. You dropped a problem off with a computer and returned a few days later to find it solved; you didn’t sit in front of it and wait.
Yet Engelbart’s vision wasn’t all that radical. Even as he imagined people sitting at computers and using them to augment and extend their work, he still saw them as big, institutional things.

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In May 1970, a group of students at the University of Illinois organized a day of action to protest the construction on campus of a supercomputer called the ILLIAC IV, primarily because it was funded by the Defense Department. They called their protest Smash ILLIAC IV and included a cartoon of the mainframe computer with screens tracking things like a “kill-die factor” and a gaping mouth labeled “Feed $$$$$$ here!”
12. Stewart Brand is a particularly interesting figure because he bridged these two branches of nerd culture. He was the camera operator at Engelbart’s “Mother of All Demos,” but he was also one of the Merry Pranksters running around on Ken Kesey’s bus. The quotation is taken from his essay “We Owe It All to the Hippies,” Time, 1 Mar. 1995.
13. http://www.digibarn.com/collections/newsletters/peoples-computer/peoples-1972-oct/index.html
14. http://www.atariarchives.org/deli/homebrew_and_how_the_apple.php
15. http://www.digibarn.com/collections/newsletters/homebrew/V2_01/index.html
16. http://www.gadgetspage.com/comps-peripheral/apple-i-computer-ad.html
17.

Few involved in the early days of the internet could ever have imagined how central to billions of people’s lives it was to become, but some of them dreamed of it. A year before the ARPANET came online, on 9 December 1968, Doug Engelbart, the ultimate unsung conceptual, philosophical and practical pioneer of modern computing, addressed a crowd of 1,000 programmers at Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park, California. It was an event that was to become known as the Mother of All Demos, and during it Engelbart displayed publicly, in one gargantuan techno-splurge, many of the concepts of computing that are so ubiquitous today: the mouse (‘I don’t know why we call it a mouse. It started that way and we never changed it,’ Engelbart said that day), video conferencing, hypertext, teleconferencing, word processing and collaborative real-time editing. It was the beginning of the modern age.1
Engelbart, in common with many intellectuals and technologists of the era, had attended LSD-assisted creativity sessions in the 1960s at the International Foundation for Advanced Study, a California psychedelic research group founded by a friend of Alexander Shulgin’s, Mylon Stolaroff.

…

It was the beginning of the modern age.1
Engelbart, in common with many intellectuals and technologists of the era, had attended LSD-assisted creativity sessions in the 1960s at the International Foundation for Advanced Study, a California psychedelic research group founded by a friend of Alexander Shulgin’s, Mylon Stolaroff. The Shulgins wrote the preface to Stolaroff’s book Thanatos to Eros (1994) detailing his experiences with LSD, MDMA, mescaline and a number of Shulgin’s creations.2
Author Stewart Brand, who coined the phrase ‘Information wants to be free’ in 1984, was responsible for filming the Mother of All Demos, and that same year he launched the Whole Earth Catalog, the ad-free samizdat techno-hippy bible. Its esoteric and wide-ranging content, from poetry to construction plans for geodesic domes by physicist Buckminster Fuller, from car repair tips to trout-fishing guides and the fundamentals of yoga and the I-ching, was hacked together using Polaroid cameras, Letraset and the highest of low-tech.

“Basically,” Brand continues, “I was just being in the Bay area paying attention to interesting people. So for the same reason I was paying attention to Ken Kesey, I was paying attention to Doug Engelbart.”
In December 1968, Engelbart demonstrated a number of his experimental ideas to a conference of computer scientists in the San Francisco Convention Center. The event was later dubbed “The Mother of all Demos”, thanks to the fact that it was the world’s first sighting of a number of computing technologies, including the mouse, email and hypertext. According to Steven Levy, author of Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, “Engelbarts support staff was as elaborate as one would find at a modern Grateful Dead concert” and that support staff included Stewart Brand, who volunteered a lot of time to set up the networked video links and cameras that made Engelbart’s demonstration go off with such a bang.

We have layers of powerful, responsive, computing resources from handheld to the cloud.
8.5 Complex Texts
Rectangular tables of data are not the only way to organize information in a computer. Lyall Morril developed Whatsit? a freeform information organizer that used triples to record relationships between entities. That was a little step toward loosening up people’s thinking in the direction Ted was and is advocating.
I am especially grateful to Ted for introducing me to Douglas Engelbart, another amazing visionary, the man who gave “the mother of all demos.” Engelbart showed creative ways of organizing work and ideas, and of collaborating online.
An attorney customer of ours created a program to organize legal arguments. His program let a user connect evidence to arguments and arguments to evidence. Primitive personal computer languages made it difficult to store text strings longer than 256 characters, but even with those limitations, the program worked well.
8.6 “Everything Is Deeply Intertwingled”
The quotation that serves as the heading for this section appeared on page D2 in the Dream Machines half of Ted’s book, Computer Lib/Dream Machines [1].

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It may have been growing on Nelson in 1967, but as I’ve said, the computing world really wasn’t about to swallow the idea of a global hypertext publishing system. Work had not even started on the ARPANET (though Ivan Sutherland and Bob Taylor had been thinking about it for some time). The computing establishment was still trying to grapple with the concept of a person sitting in front of a screen and exploring information in real-time after Doug’s mother of all demos in 1968. That demo took years—over 20 years—to filter through properly.
There was, however, an attempt to build part of Nelson’s vision at Brown University in 1967, and that resulted in a unique and historically important stand-alone system called the Hypertext Editing System. I’m not going to go into that here, however—this is Nelson’s party and I don’t want to poop it. If you are interested you can find it in my book [1], and the implementation notes are published in the Xuarchives [7].

Engelbart set himself
the grandest simulation objective of all: not simply simulating
a single mind, but instead trying to simulate the best of group
thinking and action, leading to the twined memes of symbiotic
participation.
Of course, many people, both within and outside of computer
science, have been concerned with wicked problems, but
few of them ever had the kind of immediate, public impact
that Engelbart did in 1968. For that was the year that he
gave the “mother of all demos,” a public display of his innovations and vision to an audience of his peers along with
a younger generation that he would inspire. At SRI, Engelbart
had developed a system featuring scaling windows, graphical user interfaces, live video teleconferencing, and hypertext.
A new input device of his invention—an odd-looking thing that
could control elements anywhere on the screen—directed all of
these windows and operations.

…

They
strove to humanize, decentralize, and personalize computers,
and were opposed to virtually every aspect of the way that
the Plutocrats had commodiﬁed and corporatized computing.
What the Aquarians felt was missing in the Plutocratic era
was the sense that humans had invented a new ally, not just
for the battleﬁeld, lab, or ofﬁce, but in making a better, more
creative life.
159
GENERATIONS
When people talk about Engelbart’s presentation of the NLS
(“oN-Line System”) as the “mother of all demos” what they
mean is that something about the reality of the thing—the realtime manipulation, the new input device, and the sheer totality
of it all—changed the culture of computing right then and there,
at least in the heads of those who could understand its implications. One of those best and brightest was the young Alan
Kay. A polymath who had supported himself in grad school
by playing jazz guitar, Kay had never felt comfortable in the
conﬁnes of academia.16 He had traveled down to the Bay Area
from the University of Utah, where he was a grad student in
the lab of Ivan Sutherland.

Balance that against the 3.8 million people who earned a living by driving commercially in the United States in 2012.10 Driverless cars and trucks would potentially displace many if not most of those jobs as they emerge during the next two decades.
Indeed, the question is more nuanced than one narrowly posed as a choice of saving lives or jobs. When Doug Engelbart gave what would later be billed as “The Mother of All Demos” in 1968—a demonstration of the technologies that would lead to personal computing and the Internet—he implicitly adopted the metaphor of driving. He sat at a keyboard and a display and showed how graphical interactive computing could be used to control computing and “drive” through what would become known as cyberspace. The human was very much in control in this model of intelligence augmentation.

LINKING: An NLS "link" was a character string in a statement indicating a cross-reference to another statement, whether in the same file or not. The text of the link was readable by both the user and the machine. The command "Jump to Link," followed by the selection of the link, displayed the reference statement. The use of interfile links allowed NLS users to construct large linked structures made of many files: hypertext.
THE MOTHER OF ALL DEMOS
By 1968, with the combination of the chord keyset, mouse, CRT display, and hypertext, Engelbart and his crew at SRI had concrete results to show the world. "By 1968 we had a marvelous system," Engelbart later recalled. "A few people would come and visit us, but we didn't seem to be getting the type of general interest that I expected." As a result, "I was looking for a better way to show people, so we took an immense risk and applied for a special session at the ACM/IEEE-Computer Society Fall Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco in December 1968"-the conference of the Association for Com- puting Machinery and the Institution of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.

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As a result, "I was looking for a better way to show people, so we took an immense risk and applied for a special session at the ACM/IEEE-Computer Society Fall Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco in December 1968"-the conference of the Association for Com- puting Machinery and the Institution of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. Every book devoted to personal computing at some point reports this fa- mous presentation, which Douglas Engelbart and his staff offered at the AFIPS Fall Joint Computer Conference on December 9, 1968, later dubbed "the
SRI and the oN-LIne System 139
mother of all demos" by Andries van Dam, as indeed it was, with the likes of Microsoft and Apple eventually building on the basis of innovations first in- troduced there. Reiterating such a pervasive generic formula in accounts of the history of the personal computer seems obligatory. In place of yet another reci- tation of one of the computer community's foundational tribal tales, however, here is Engelbart's own account of the first time that the personal interface was publicly presented to the world outside of the laboratory, assembled from rec- ollections published in 1988 (Engelbart 1988, 202- 6) 21 and an oral history interview that Henry Lowood and Judy Adams conducted in 1987 (Engelbart 199 6 ).22
What do you do to get people going on augmentation kinds of things?

pages: 431words: 129,071

Selfie: How We Became So Self-Obsessed and What It's Doing to Us
by
Will Storr

When it was all over, the crowd rose to their feet and cheered, spellbound, enthralled. Not only had Engelbart introduced the world to the notion of the computer as a personal assistant controlled by a mouse, keyboard and cursor, he’d shown them a graphical user interface which formed the basis of the ‘windows’ he’d been manipulating, hyperlinks and the concept of the networked online realm we know today as the Web. It would become known, in Silicon Valley, as ‘the mother of all demos’. Up on that screen, Engelbart the crackpot had, in the memorable phrase of one observer, been ‘dealing lightning with both hands’. It wasn’t just that the technology was new, the foundational concept behind it was revolutionary. Here, for the first time, was computing that had been designed to be personal. It wasn’t a machine for repression and coercion. It all worked in service of the I.

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Book Six: The Digital Self
A man, Doug Engelbart, appearing in a headset: My account of the story of Doug Engelbart, ARC, EST and Stewart Brand was mostly sourced from: What the Dormouse Said, John Markoff (Penguin, 2005); From Counterculture to Cyberculture, Fred Turner (University of Chicago Press, 2006); The Network Revolution, Jacques Vallee (Penguin, 1982); Bootstrapping, Thierry Bardini (Stanford University Press, 2000); ‘Chronicle of the Death of a Laboratory: Douglas Engelbart and the Failure of the Knowledge Workshop’, Thierry Bardini and Michael Friedewald, History of Technology (2003), 23, pp. 191–212; ‘Douglas Engelbart’s lasting legacy’, Tia O’Brien, Mercury News, 3 March 2013. A video of Engelbart’s presentation is widely available online. The account I’ve given in the text has been lightly edited for sense and concision.
audience considered Engelbart a ‘crackpot’: ‘The Mother of All Demos – 150 years ahead of its time’, Cade Metz, Register, 11 December 2008.
John Markoff has called ‘a complete vision of the information age’: What the Dormouse Said, John Markoff (Penguin, 2005), p. 9.
In 1968, the year of the demo, the Institute’s co-founder Michael Murphy had written: ‘Esalen: Where Man Confronts Himself’, Michael Murphy, Stanford Alumni Almanac, May 1968.
with one 1985 Esquire story reporting ‘scientists’: ‘Encounters at the Mind’s Edge’, George Leonard, Esquire, June 1985.

In 1968, an idealistic computer scientist named Doug Engelbart brought together hundreds of interested industry onlookers at the San Francisco Civic Center—the same civic center where the iPhone 7 demo was made nearly forty years later—and introduced a handful of technologies that would form the foundational DNA of modern personal computing.
Not only did Engelbart show off publicly a number of inventions like the mouse, keypads, keyboards, word processors, hypertext, videoconferencing, and windows, he showed them off by using them in real time.
The tech journalist Steven Levy would call it “the mother of all demos,” and the name stuck.
A video feed shared the programs and technologies being demoed onscreen. It was a far cry from the more polished product launches Jobs would become famous for decades later; Engelbart broadcast his own head in the frame as, over the course of an hour and a half, he displayed new feats of computing and made delightfully odd quips and self-interruptions.
“As windows open and shut, and their contents reshuffled, the audience stared into the maw of cyberspace,” Levy writes.

…

He imagined people logging on to the same system to share information to improve their understanding of the world and its increasingly complex problems. He advocated something a lot like the modern internet, social networking, and a mode of computing that, through the smartphone, has indeed begun the supplanting of the PC as the primary way we most often trade information.
Though Engelbart’s mother of all demos became legendary among the computer crowd, it was an outsider, it seems, who would turn Steve on to the format he later became famous for. Apple expert Leander Kahney says that Jobs’s keynotes were the product of CEO John Sculley: “A marketing expert, he envisioned the product announcements as ‘news theater,’ a show put on for the press. The idea was to stage an event that the media would treat as news, generating headlines for whatever product was introduced.

Doug called the system he had built the oN-Line System (NLS), and in the 100-minute demonstration that would follow he planned to introduce the world to (in the words of Engelbart’s biographer Thierry Bardini) “windows, hypertext, graphics, efficient navigation, command input, videoconferencing, the computer mouse, word processing, dynamic file linking, revision control, and a collaborative real-time editor.” But for the moment no one was sure that what would later be called the Mother of All Demos would work. Doug had told someone at NASA earlier in the week that he was going to show the system publicly—“Maybe it’s a better idea you don’t tell us, just in case it crashes,” the NASA employee advised him. Doug’s chief engineer, Bill English, had been a theatrical stage manager and knew that the demonstration had to be ready as soon as the audience showed up. But what a show. Let Doug explain.

By reading manuals, he taught himself the state of the art of programming at the time: punching holes in paper tape that corresponded to individual bits and feeding the tape into a reader that sent commands to a computer. There was no operating system and no software—just spools of perforated tape. Felsenstein describes the first time he successfully programmed a computer to type the letter A as a “transcendent experience.”
While he was at Ampex, a researcher from Stanford named Doug Engelbart gave a presentation at a conference in San Francisco that would go down in history as “the Mother of All Demos.” Engelbart and McCarthy worked on opposite sides of campus and represented opposite sides of a philosophical divide. While McCarthy wanted to design machines that were powerful enough to replace human intelligence, Engelbart wanted to figure out ways of using computers to augment it. Over the course of ninety minutes, Engelbart set forth the fundamental elements of the modern digital age in a single seamless package: graphical user interfaces, multiple window displays, mouse-driven navigation, word processing, hypertext linking, videoconferencing, and real-time collaboration.

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That problem was solved when a programmer at a bustling commune in San Francisco called Project One wangled the long-term lease of an SDS 940 (retail cost: $300,000) from the Transamerica Corporation. This mighty machine—which was twenty-four feet long and required a fleet of air conditioners to stay cool—already had a storied history. It was the first computer designed to support McCarthy’s time-sharing scheme directly. It was also the computer Engelbart had used to power the Mother of All Demos. It was a chunk of hardware with unusually good karma.
The hacker subculture incubated at MIT was thriving in places like SAIL, Xerox PARC, and the now legendary garages of Cupertino and San José. Soon Whole Earth Catalog impresario Stewart Brand would unleash this subculture on the unsuspecting inhabitants of Greater Mundania with the ultimate endorsement in Rolling Stone: “Computers are coming to the people.

Local newspaper articles that preceded the conference noted that there would be discussions of the privacy implications of the use of computers, and a public forum, “Information, Computers and the Political Process,” would feature broadcaster Edward P. Morgan and Santa Clara County’s member of the House of Representatives, Paul McCloskey Jr.
But Engelbart stole the show. In the days afterward, the published accounts of the event described nothing else. Years later, his talk remained “the mother of all demos,” in the words of Andries van Dam, a Brown University computer scientist. In many ways, it is still the most remarkable computer-technology demonstration of all time.
“Fantastic World of Tomorrow’s Computer” was the headline in the San Francisco Chronicle, which noted that Engelbart had said that his group was consciously steering clear of any artificial “brain” or thinking computer. The more subtle distinction between the opposing goals of augmentation and automation was lost on the writer, but it was at the very heart of the demonstration.

Stewart Brand, who also attended the event, featured it in the January 1970 supplement to the Whole
Earth Catalog.14
Even as Brand was helping introduce the members of ARC to the commune-based readership of the Whole Earth Catalog, his connections to the
group introduced him to the future of computing. In 1968 Dave Evans recruited Brand to serve as a videographer for an event that would become
known as the “mother of all demos.”15 On December 9 of that year, at the
Association for Computing Machinery / Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (ACM/IEEE)–Computer Society’s Fall Joint Computer
Conference in San Francisco, Engelbart and members of the ARC team
demonstrated the NLS system to three thousand computer engineers.
Engelbart sat on stage with a screen behind him depicting both himself and
the text he was working on.

The effect of psychedelic drugs on society, to Rossman, could just as well be expressed in the language of engineering: “In the cybernetic description of process,” he wrote, “the corresponding passage is to a higher order of control—one that makes possible heterarchical rather than hierarchical control systems.”40 What he meant was simple: counterculture was changing established power structures. Top down was the past; bottom up was the future. That’s where technology came in.
Rossman understood already in 1969 that computers had a key role to play in the future. As the free-speech activist was considering writing a book, the inventor Douglas Engelbart gave what became known as “the mother of all demos,” a now legendary ninety-minute presentation at the Fall Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco. Engelbart introduced the prototype of the first mouse and the vision of a personal computer, a computer that could be owned and operated by everybody, not only IBM and the Pentagon.
To Rossman, that meant technology wasn’t on the side of authority any longer. The future was brightening up: the “free use of computer technology” would mean that fifteen years into the future, flat structures would trump centralized power.